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Psalm 38

Well, I never. We certainly find the psalmist at a very low ebb this week! I hope you have never felt quite this bad, but I also imagine that you can recognize parts of it in your life experience. Unless, of course, the sky of your life has never had the suspicion of a cloud and everything has always been plain sailing. If this is the case, you needn’t read further!

However, let’s begin by thinking about the implication of the first verse: “O LORD, rebuke me not in thy anger.” Just how do we conceive of God being angry?

In theology, one of the attributes we claim to be true of God apart from being all-powerful, all-knowing, and present everywhere in a moment of time is that God is impassible; that is, God does not experience either suffering or what the early church collectively called “the passions.” Today, we tend to use the word passion only in a popular connection with the feelings of romantic love. However, to the early Christians it meant the disorderly emotional impulses, usually sinful, that buffet the human heart: lust, vanity, pride, greed, anger, avariciousness, and jealousy. Certainly, we would not think of attributing any of these to a holy and righteous God; these impulses are our problem. This is perhaps what the psalmist is referring to in verse 8 as “the tumult of my heart.”

So that does not get us very far. Evidently, to attribute anger to God in a way that makes it a kind of superabundant escalation of what we experience as anger would be very misleading if not sinful in itself. But can we as moderns still conceive of God’s anger in a meaningful way? Let’s explore an idea. When we jump off a high place without benefit of a pair of wings or a parachute, the consequence, a matter of seconds later, is painful contact with the ground. Should we survive the fall, we do not rebuke the ground for having hurt us or imagine that the ground was “angry” with us because it gave us an injury. We accept that the force of gravity, a law of the universe, will operate whatever we might think about it. Not to do so would be like the actions of a child who, having hit his or her head on the corner of a drawer, smacks it with a hand as if it were the drawer’s fault! So, if we understand creation as the principles and, to an extent, the nature of God made manifest, then when we choose to ignore those principles or fight against them, the result, we could say, is experienced as “God’s anger.”

This can be said to be true of the whole concept of sin. The sufferings we experience through living a life in opposition to God (and, by the way, in opposition to our created nature) arise because we are experiencing the pain of beating our heads repeatedly against the way God is and creation is. We can certainly see how comprehensively destructive sin can be, revealed in the psalmist’s experience. Every part of the human being is chaotically disrupted: physical health (verse 5), mental stability (verse 9), and even social relationships (verse 11). In each case, the psalmist traces the source of the problem to unconfessed sin. This does not, perish the thought, mean that all physical suffering is punishment for sin; but it does mean that hostility to God and the unbridled pursuit of selfish passions have the effect of a gradual destruction of the human being.

I am reminded of Moses’ great adjuration to the people in Deuteronomy: “See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you this day, by loving the LORD your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of it. . . . I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse” (Deuteronomy 30:15-16, 19).

In the idea I proposed, the commandments, statutes, and ordinances are not just moral rules but creative principles, springing from God’s nature, woven into creation. The blessing and curse come from understanding the nature of God and living in harmony with the divine purpose. If we ignore these things, we will experience the “anger” of God, or, metaphorically, continually jump off the same building!

For Reflection

What do you think about God’s “anger”?

Prayer

Lord, teach me to live in joyful harmony with your purpose. Amen.